History is littered with the smoking ruins of the unintended consequences of official decisions.
In the wake of the Titanic disaster, new laws were passed, mandating that all ships over 100 tons had to carry enough lifeboats for every passenger. The only problem was that not all ships were designed to do so safely: 800 people drowned when the Eastland capsized under the extra load of all its new lifeboats.
More recently, conservations undertook to eradicate cats from remote Macquarie island, to protect its native birds. The campaign successfully rid the island of cats – whereupon rabbits bred uncontrollably, triggering an “ecological meltdown”. The Australian government has had to spend over ten years and $100m fixing the damage caused by good intentions.
The panicked mass evacuations from everywhere near Fukushima caused far more suffering and death than the nuclear accident itself.
Now, experts are warning that, for all its good intentions, the panicked response by governments around the world to control the Chinese virus may trigger even worse consequences.
Veteran scholar of epidemiology Dr. Knut Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City, argued in a interview published earlier this month that shelter-in-place policies could actually result in more deaths in the long term.
In the absence of a vaccine, the idea of “eradicating” the virus is fanciful, at best. The only hope for such a strategy would be for countries like Australia and New Zealand to completely isolate themselves and ruthlessly quarantine their populations.
Focusing on shielding the most vulnerable to the virus (our elderly and folks with comorbidities) while allowing the young and healthy to build up immunity would, in the end, save more lives, Wittkowski argued.
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity…so, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated,” he continued.
More importantly, allowing herd immunity to build up in the general population now would forestall the kind of dreaded “second wave” already manifesting in China.
“If we are preventing herd immunity from developing, it is almost guaranteed that we have a second wave as soon as either we stop the social distancing or the climate changes with winter coming or something like that,” added Wittkowski.
Unfortunately, politicians with a natural bent for authoritarianism are only listening to advice that they already want to hear – and applying only those prescriptions which gel with their own preferences.
When politicians like Jacinda Ardern aver that they are “listening to the experts”, the truth is that they are only listening to some of the experts. Because expert opinion is divided and not all “experts” have the same expertise.
Ardern is certainly not listening to experts like Wittkowski, nor Dr. David L. Katz.
Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, writing at The New York Times on March 20, suggested our “fight” against COVID-19 could be worse than the virus itself[…]
[“W]e could achieve the crucial goals of social distancing — saving lives and not overwhelming our medical system — by preferentially protecting the medically frail and those over age 60, and in particular those over 70 and 80, from exposure,” Dr. Katz explained.
“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself,” he added.
Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford University School of Medicine is also warning that limited testing is leading to selection bias and dramatically overstating the threat from the virus. Other Stanford medical professors agree.
“The woefully inadequate data we have so far, the meta-research specialist argues, indicates that the extreme measures taken by many countries are likely way out of line and may result in ultimately unnecessary and catastrophic consequences.”
To use an analogy, you could burn your house down and point to the charred nest and proclaim that you have successfully eradicated your termite problem. Which would be true. But that’s not the only way to eradicate termites, and you’ve undeniably created worse problems than you already had.
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